Bitcoin Forum

I had a hell of a time piecing together instructions from different posts/blogs/websites that got me from the clean setup of a new box to bitcoin mining. It looks like things change so fast in this game that instructions are outdated as soon as they're posted, but I figured I'd put up what worked for me, along with the sources that supplied the information.

I went from a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.04 on a AMD Phenom II / ASUS motherboard / 64 bit / 2x Radeon 6790 system to mining with the following steps:

1.) Installing GPU drivers (from http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Natty_Installation_Guide#Installing_the_drivers_manually)

First, I tried to use the default ubuntu third party driver install for the cards (left watermark on screen). Had to wipe Ubuntu and start again. This time, used a manual install:

• sudo apt-get install build-essential cdbs fakeroot dh-make debhelper debconf libstdc++6 dkms libqtgui4 wget execstack libelfg0 dh-modaliases
• sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
• sudo wget http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-11-6-x86.x86_64.run
• chmod +x ati-driver-installer-11-6-x86.x86_64.run
• sudo sh ./ati-driver-installer-11-6-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/natty
• sudo dpkg -i fglrx*.deb
• sudo aticonfig --initial -f --adapter=all

2.) Installing AMD APP SDK and Phoenix Miner (from http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7514.0;all)

After multiple fails and restarts, I decided to give these instructions a try, and they worked. I’m not sure if there is an overlap here with my previous installation of Catalyst (above), as these instructions didn’t call for a separate step where you install the drivers. There also seem to be some unnecessary steps (screen?), but whatever, it worked for me ...

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install screen
• screen -S update sudo apt-get install fglrx vim openssh-server g++ libboost-all-dev subversion git-core python-numpy
• Enter your password.
• Once the updates are going, press CTRL-A then press D.  You should detach from the screen and be returned to a prompt.
• screen -d -m -S icd wget http://download2-developer.amd.com/amd/Stream20GA/icd-registration.tgz
• screen -d -m -S pyopencl wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pyopencl/pyopencl-0.92.tar.gz
• screen -d -m -S stream wget http://download2-developer.amd.com/amd/APPSDK/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64.tgz
• screen -r stream
• If you get a "There is no screen to be resumed" message, continue on.  Otherwise, you should get a download status, wait until it's done, then continue on.
• sudo tar xvfz AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64.tgz -C /opt
• sudo tar xvfz /opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64/icd-registration.tgz -C /
• tar zxfv pyopencl-0.92.tar.gz
• screen -r update
• If you get a "There is no screen to be resumed" mesasge, continue on.  Otherwise, wait for the update to finish. You will be returned to a prompt when it's done.
• svn checkout http://svn.json-rpc.org/trunk/python-jsonrpc
• svn checkout http://svn3.xp-dev.com/svn/phoenix-miner/trunk
• git clone git://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm poclbm
• mv trunk phoenix
• echo export DISPLAY=:0 >> ~/.bashrc
• cd pyopencl-0.92
• sudo sh -c 'echo "/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64/lib/x86_64/" >> /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf'
• ./configure.py --cl-inc-dir=/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64/include/ --cl-lib-dir=/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64/lib/x86_64
• sudo ldconfig
• source ~/.bashrc
• make -j3
• sudo make install
• cd ../python-jsonrpc
• sudo python setup.py install
• cd ~
• chmod +x phoenix/phoenix.py poclbm/poclbm.py
• sudo aticonfig --initial -f --adapter=all
• sudo reboot

Also, this website has come in handy for me:
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Aticonfighelp (all about the aticonfig command)

Well in Step 1 you install the video drivers and in step 2 you do it again:

screen -S update sudo apt-get install fglrx vim openssh-server g++ libboost-all-dev subversion git-core python-numpy